Chinese President Xi Jinping said that by 2035 his country would cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 7% to 10% from their peak, a day after President Donald Trump called climate change a “con job.”
I’ve been very critical of - well, not so much China or Chinese people as the current regime, but credit where credit is due - they have made an phenomenal effort on the environmental front, and there’s plenty the rest of us could learn from that.
Truly shameful for the US. Green energy should have been reframed as national defense long ago. Maybe then some of these fucks would get out of the way.
Heh. I’m reminded of the story of what happened when Donald Sadoway was pitching liquid metal batteries to the US Army. He was asked what would happen if a sniper were to put a .50 BMG into one of them. His response? “Well, it’ll leak a little inert non-toxic metal and then self-seal whereupon it’ll just keep working”.
…We still don’t use those for reasons I cannot fathom, despite them being literally cheap as dirt and perfect for grid-level storage.
Every time somebody talk about renewables, some twat also goes “but what about storage?” and has me screaming “WE’VE HAD THE PERFECT SOLUTION SINCE 2009, GOD DAMN IT!”.
Because they are not feasible. I don’t know how many battery stories I have heard over the years and none of them have ever been mass produced. Discovering something in a lab is not the same as mass producing stuff.
Maybe you should look into the operating principles before you declare them ‘infeasible’. They’re a vessel filled with antimony, magnesium and a liquid salt electrolyte that self-separates according to specific gravity. Since both the anode and cathode are made of liquid metal, there’s no structural degradation over time. They can be trivially scaled to just about any size you like and are made exclusively from Earth-abundant cheap elements. Just about the only tricky thing is that the operating temperature of a working cell is 600C, but that’s hardly an issue for a grid-level storage facility.
It is actually even more insane then that. We know how to built electricity grids. The US is a large country, so it is pretty much a given, that it is windy somewhere in the US. Somewhat similar story with solar as well, but of cause nights cause a bit of a problem. The storage needed to run a well connected grid is fairly low. More so the US has a lot of hydro. The water reservoir can be used as a form of power storage, by changing how much water is let out. Obviously there are limits to that, but the potential is massive.
I’m not sure who downvoted you, but China’s carbon emissions p/c have more than tripled this century, and for only two years (up to 2022) in that period have they been less than the year prior, and even then, by tiny amounts.
Plenty of countries have worse figures (including the US, Canada, and Australia), but unless the trajectory has changed notably since 2022, it doesn’t paint a pretty picture. The US has dropped by a third in the same period, though it’s much too high.
Probably because while change over time is important, it’s a trickier metric to cross compare.
For example, at the beginning of the century, their per capita emissions were low and also, nearly half of the population was in extreme poverty. So while we can balk at the tripling, it seems unfair since the competition was already high and mostly due to people living it up.
To say China is doing worse than the US because they went up while the US went down, well the per capita for US is still 50% higher than China in absolute terms. Now the UK can claim that in absolute and relative terms they are doing better.
Though even then you have some hiccups. UK emissions per capita are down and are really low compared to China numbers, fantastic. How much, however, is due to outsourcing the ecologically inconvenient manufacturing to nations like China? If the contribution of imports added to things, how does the picture shift?
On the flip side, the focus on per-capita in the name of fairness also unreasonably gives a pass to huge polluters in China. If a heavily polluting endeavor sets up shop in china, no big deal, they get to just divide their impact by 1.4 billion to not seem so bad, even if the portion of population pertinent to their stuff rounds to zero. So I wonder how much of that ecology impact is actually concentrated among a lot less rosy small population rather than just the consequence of improved quality of life for an average person in the nation.
Solid response, thanks. FWIW, I wasn’t trying to suggest that the US is doing well in this regard, just that someone could read the headline and assume that China could reasonably be considered a green country (so to speak).
Regarding the UK, it’s certainly true that domestic manufacture has nearly vanished in the last 50 years, so while a reduced dependency on coal, stricter rules on vehicles, and other similar factors are probably important, I agree that they’re also likely not the only type of change that affects this – and if so, that really represents the carbon pollution moving elsewhere, as you’ve mentioned.
Yeah, it’s just all a big complicated mess when trying to play a lot of comparative games. You can make China look great or look bad and each angle has a fair point to be made. So folks end up highlighting their point and get reasonable agreement and offense all at the same time…
I’ve been very critical of - well, not so much China or Chinese people as the current regime, but credit where credit is due - they have made an phenomenal effort on the environmental front, and there’s plenty the rest of us could learn from that.
Truly shameful for the US. Green energy should have been reframed as national defense long ago. Maybe then some of these fucks would get out of the way.
Heh. I’m reminded of the story of what happened when Donald Sadoway was pitching liquid metal batteries to the US Army. He was asked what would happen if a sniper were to put a .50 BMG into one of them. His response? “Well, it’ll leak a little inert non-toxic metal and then self-seal whereupon it’ll just keep working”.
…We still don’t use those for reasons I cannot fathom, despite them being literally cheap as dirt and perfect for grid-level storage.
Every time somebody talk about renewables, some twat also goes “but what about storage?” and has me screaming “WE’VE HAD THE PERFECT SOLUTION SINCE 2009, GOD DAMN IT!”.
Because they are not feasible. I don’t know how many battery stories I have heard over the years and none of them have ever been mass produced. Discovering something in a lab is not the same as mass producing stuff.
Maybe you should look into the operating principles before you declare them ‘infeasible’. They’re a vessel filled with antimony, magnesium and a liquid salt electrolyte that self-separates according to specific gravity. Since both the anode and cathode are made of liquid metal, there’s no structural degradation over time. They can be trivially scaled to just about any size you like and are made exclusively from Earth-abundant cheap elements. Just about the only tricky thing is that the operating temperature of a working cell is 600C, but that’s hardly an issue for a grid-level storage facility.
It is actually even more insane then that. We know how to built electricity grids. The US is a large country, so it is pretty much a given, that it is windy somewhere in the US. Somewhat similar story with solar as well, but of cause nights cause a bit of a problem. The storage needed to run a well connected grid is fairly low. More so the US has a lot of hydro. The water reservoir can be used as a form of power storage, by changing how much water is let out. Obviously there are limits to that, but the potential is massive.
Their emissions per capita are up like 200% in the past couple decades. Meanwhile the UK and most of Scandinavia (not Norway) have cut it in half.
I’m not sure who downvoted you, but China’s carbon emissions p/c have more than tripled this century, and for only two years (up to 2022) in that period have they been less than the year prior, and even then, by tiny amounts.
Plenty of countries have worse figures (including the US, Canada, and Australia), but unless the trajectory has changed notably since 2022, it doesn’t paint a pretty picture. The US has dropped by a third in the same period, though it’s much too high.
Probably because while change over time is important, it’s a trickier metric to cross compare.
For example, at the beginning of the century, their per capita emissions were low and also, nearly half of the population was in extreme poverty. So while we can balk at the tripling, it seems unfair since the competition was already high and mostly due to people living it up.
To say China is doing worse than the US because they went up while the US went down, well the per capita for US is still 50% higher than China in absolute terms. Now the UK can claim that in absolute and relative terms they are doing better.
Though even then you have some hiccups. UK emissions per capita are down and are really low compared to China numbers, fantastic. How much, however, is due to outsourcing the ecologically inconvenient manufacturing to nations like China? If the contribution of imports added to things, how does the picture shift?
On the flip side, the focus on per-capita in the name of fairness also unreasonably gives a pass to huge polluters in China. If a heavily polluting endeavor sets up shop in china, no big deal, they get to just divide their impact by 1.4 billion to not seem so bad, even if the portion of population pertinent to their stuff rounds to zero. So I wonder how much of that ecology impact is actually concentrated among a lot less rosy small population rather than just the consequence of improved quality of life for an average person in the nation.
Solid response, thanks. FWIW, I wasn’t trying to suggest that the US is doing well in this regard, just that someone could read the headline and assume that China could reasonably be considered a green country (so to speak).
Regarding the UK, it’s certainly true that domestic manufacture has nearly vanished in the last 50 years, so while a reduced dependency on coal, stricter rules on vehicles, and other similar factors are probably important, I agree that they’re also likely not the only type of change that affects this – and if so, that really represents the carbon pollution moving elsewhere, as you’ve mentioned.
Yeah, it’s just all a big complicated mess when trying to play a lot of comparative games. You can make China look great or look bad and each angle has a fair point to be made. So folks end up highlighting their point and get reasonable agreement and offense all at the same time…